Animation Production: The Making of “Meet Medlio”

October 10, 2013

Have you ever wondered how animation is made?

Rough concepts written onto scraps of paper, images doodled on a crowded whiteboard and sketches crudely scribbled into tiny notebooks — this is where the ideas for our animation production all begin. But that’s only the beginning.

What follows is the rigorous process of refinement, filtering and repetition that goes into animation production. Animation production is a delicate balance of creativity and technology.

Once we’ve settled on an idea, the first step is to write a script. The script will typically go through a number of rewrites to ensure that it has both a good story and the necessary information the client needs the video to convey.

After the scripts are finalized the next step in animation production is storyboarding. Think of storyboards like rough comic strips. These storyboards give a rough visual of the sequential story we’re trying to tell.

The storyboard phase pretty much runs parallel to the concept phase for character designs. This is when we really start to flesh-out the look and feel of the video. There’s a lot of “world building” in this phase.

After the character designs begin to take shape we turn our rough sketches and drawings into vector artwork that can be manipulated with our animation software. Adding color and texture to the characters and environments, this phase of animation production really brings your world to life.

The next step is arguably the most difficult and time consuming — actual animation. Now it’s time to take all of your designs and put them into motion. This requires drawing and redrawing your elements to give them movement. If the last phase was where things come to life – this phase is where you actually have to force the progression of that life — AKA — make them DO things.

Obviously animation production isn’t easy, but it is a ton of fun — and seeing your original creation move is incredibly satisfying. We at Three Post look forward to producing many more videos like this in the future.